Congratulations Australia!

Here is a nice YouTube video about the launch on August 6, of digital radio in Australia.

Tremendous coverage and enthusiasm…for radio! Fun. Uplifting. Enjoy.

Best wishes to everyone, and especially my clients, the stations of the Australian Radio Network.

Are You Effective?

We are focused on the wrong thing when we focus on cume.

Lot’s of listeners. Well, at least a lot of exposure of our audio to the PPM devices.

But at the same time, radio stations are making changes. And not one of those changes is designed to make listeners love us.

We try to keep the PPM meter from wandering out of range. We don’t have a plan for bringing them back. Retention, yes. Attraction, no.

But our job is really quite simple. Connect listeners and advertisers.

If we are not trusted by our listeners, they won’t respond to our suggestions, including our request that they go to a website, ours or that of an advertiser.

If we are not trusted, we lose the kind of extra value that made spots on the Larry Lujack show go for 3 times the CPM charged by other stations in Chicago.

If we structure our programming to bury our advertiser messages in huge 6 minute blocks, which pretty much guarantees that the message isn’t heard, we aren’t doing much to help our advertisers.

When listeners tell us that they prefer 1 minute of commercials and we give them 6, we don’t win their trust.

If we don’t hire talented people and give them the time and resources to build compelling commercials, we lose another opportunity to be of service.

When our on-air “talent” add nothing, we lose another opportunity to build an lead a tribe of people who are naturally cohesive in terms of age, and like-minded in the areas of culture and music. We waste a unique opportunity not found on an iPod.

Our only connection to listeners is as a source of music background during times when it is too inconvenient to tap into the Internet or personal music collections. Our only connection to advertisers is to deliver an audience of people who are not engaged, not hearing their ads, not benefiting from any halo of trust in our personalities or brand.

I suppose that I’m going way out on a limb here, but here goes…

That won’t work.

On the other hand, giving value to listeners and service to advertisers is fun, personally rewarding, and professionally effective.

Let’s do what does work!

Magazines versus Radio

People have been writing about the problems other media have. Newspapers are in trouble. Magazines are in trouble. Mark Ramsey recently blogged about the subject. Which prompted me to write this, comparing my experiences reading magazines to my experiences listening to commercial radio today.

Sadly, I think comparing radio to magazines makes us look even worse.

I just bought a new iMac. Never owned a Mac. But there are magazines that I can turn to and be confident that I am exposed to all kinds of new ideas and products that are suddenly interesting. And I can be also be confident I won't find ads for Windows 7. Content is aligned with shared interests.

But I also have an interest in a number of popular bands and singers. What do I learn from any of the radio stations I listen to? Zip. Nada. U2 was here Tuesday night. How did it go? What was the best received song? How old was the audience? How is the new Bon Jovi stuff being received? What is the number one song for people who are like me? What will be the next number one song? How do we know? Any great local bands for people who also like the music on this station? No, not the ones you're paid to recommend. What does the tribe have to say? You don't know? You don't F-ing know?

I could just keep writing. It doesn't matter what I write. The answer still is that when I listen to stations, I learn nothing. I can't, because they don't know anything about me or what I like. They are tracking other stations
airplay, not my opinions. They don't track listening choices or loyalty. They track "audio exposure". Like how many people thumbed through the Mac magazine sitting on the shelf at Borders? I connect to nobody. The station websites, Facebook, Twitter, blah blah are all excuses to talk about ticket giveaways. you'd think the entire world lived for the chance to win a ticket. All hail Ticket!

But I do get music beds that make it harder to understand the content (radio's version of pink text on a blue background). And until the day when my Mac mag makes me sit through 7 minutes of utter crap before I'm allowed to start reading the next article, radio remains the big loser in the battle to be an entertaining experience.